Deeplinks Blog posts about Free Speech

“Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?”

“Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?”

Our right to express opinions online—for instance, to criticize copyright trolls and their demands for money in hopes of scaring them away—are protected by the First Amendment. The Georgia Supreme Court correctly underscored these protections in a ruling late last week about the state’s anti-stalking law. The panel overturned a trial judge’s astonishing order directing a website owner to remove all statements about a poet and motivational speaker who had a sideline business of demanding thousands of dollars from anyone who posted her prose online—a practice that had sparked plenty of criticism on the web.

A federal judge has decisively halted the Mississippi Attorney General’s campaign of threatening to prosecute Google for refusing to remove content he finds objectionable. The court ruled in Google’s favor a few weeks ago but finally issued its complete order last Friday, March 27. The order is pretty damning, finding that Google presented “significant evidence of bad faith” on the Attorney General’s part.

Following the terrorist attacks in Paris in January, including the murder of several journalists at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, weanticipated that the French government wouldoverreact. Sure enough, recent reporting has revealed that France is censoring websites and pushing for broader surveillance powers.